“A good composer does not imitate; he steals.”

-Igor Stravinsky

Music is a communication of ideas. Those ideas don’t just come from the sky, they’re usually a combination of everything you’ve seen, tasted, smelt, felt, and heard. I have a problem with musicians that say “I just play what the song needs.” Who the FUCK are you to think you know what a song ‘needs’? No, my approach is to do EVERYTHING I CAN and hope that the song needs what I play.
I’ve read a million band biographies that start out like “xxxxxxxxx band can’t be defined into a single genre because they’re so different to everyone else and they’re in a league of their own.”
And then I click on their music and it sounds like Tool.

There IS nothing original!! I learnt this from a very early age. I said to my guitar teacher once - “It’s hard to sound original, everything’s been done before.”
He said “Bullshit! At what precise moment did everything all of a sudden become ‘done before’?” and then he told me that Stravinsky quote at the top of this blog.

And so since then, I’ve recklessly stolen from other bands, movies, artists, anyone I could steal from really. Because its okay! THEY stole from other people too!!

I stole so much once, I stole from bands I liked, and then bands that those guys liked, and then bands that THOSE guys liked, until I eventually got to a guy hitting a rock with a stick. And I stole from him.

THAT’S what art is (probably.)

Composers from centuries ago were way more cool with it, they’d even call their works “Variations on a theme of Joseph Haydn” aka “I’m stealing the shit out of a Joseph Haydn melody and making a new song out of it”.
Because, back then, music really, really was an exchange of ideas, they were way more casual on things like ownership and copyright.

Nowadays we get Coldplay getting sued by Joe Satriani because a melody is kinda the same, or GaGa criticism that she’s just re-hashing old 80’s pop. And worse, we’ve got the whole PIPA thing happening… (who themselves steal too!)

My view is that we have to CALM THIS SHIT DOWN.

Art needs to steal from itself. Forget money! Forget making a decent living from art! What artist ever made good work from living comfortably? Living comfortably is the opposite of art. Art needs to steal from itself because that’s the essence of art! Taking an idea, screwing around with it, getting another idea from somewhere else, smashing it against the first idea you found, extracting what you like, throwing out what you don’t like, thinking about what other people do and don’t like, thinking about whether you want to communicate with these people, adjusting shit accordingly, put something in that ‘came to you in a dream’ (which is really just an amalgamation of your desires, hopes, life experiences, and shit you saw on TV when you were a kid), and BAM! You have ART.

We live in the best time for art ever, since history started or whatever.

Have you even heard what’s out there?

Anyway, I’m using bold and caps and italics far too much (I blame the Brahms I’m listening to), so I’ll just say that -

Toehider steals shit. But what makes us cool, is that we don’t deny it.

Salty does it again! For any Henson/Bowie fans.

Check out the giant Toe codpiece. Dude needs a cameltoehider.

Every time I’m put on hold on the phone, I imagine that I’m a guy living in the 1700’s, and I have this amazing opportunity to hold a speaker to my ear in my own home, and listen to all of this wonderful, beautiful music that I would otherwise have to pay to see at the music hall, or go to church to hear. Then I feel sad when someone takes my call. I forget what the call was for, I’m thinking too much about how cool it would have been if I was the only guy in 1756 to have one of these devices in my house.